Too Growed up for that...

I bet even if God offered to let us all go back to Eden and start all over again, most of us would be pretty quick to say no.

"What? You want us to run around doing nothing but eating fruit and gardening? While naked? No Internet or cable TV? No Playstation? No iPods or designer clothes? No oreo cookies? No novels or luxurious mode of travel? No action figures?"

I'm not saying that any of the things above are bad things in and of themselves. I'm just musing that we've risen (or rather fallen) to such a point that part of us wouldn't be able to accept God's original plan for us.

I also assume that this is one of the reasons God finds it necessary to subject us to Purgatory. As much as we might love God in our fallen way, we are probably going to require a quite a bit reformatting if we are going to really appreciate Heaven. And maybe Purgatory becomes part of an answer to all those people who ask why God let's people do evil...why God doesn't just reprogram us in such a way as to make us incapable of doing bad things? It seems to me that Purgatory follows that kind of logic (after a certain fashion). God doesn't really reprogram us...but He will strip us of our attachments if we don't do it ourselves, because He isn't going to tolerate in Heaven any of the nonsense He lets us get away with here. The question that remains is whether there would be anything good in us after the purging (and we know where we go if there wouldn't be).

But even that sounds a little off-putting. Maybe it's better to think of Purgatory less like Hell-lite and more like Heaven's orientation class...

Assuming, gentle reader, that we can distinguish between orientation classes and Hell-lite.